archive

March 03, 2009

No longer simple

In the past ten days or so, we fans of Test cricket have followed:

* A triple century and a near-triple century.

* A century by a little slip of a wicketkeeper who has never so far fulfilled his batting potential; yet when he got to the mark, he pulled from his pocket a sheet of paper that had the names of those who stood by him, meaning he had been confident from the start of getting there.

* A down-to-the-wire draw in Antigua that confirmed the unique capacity of this form of the game to produce twists and turns and bitten-off nails. On Cricinfo, Andrew McGlashan called it "the most nerve-jangling of results"; his colleague Andrew Miller said it "was the game at its very, very best."

* A superb Australian win in South Africa, over a South African team that had dominated them in Australia. And this win was engineered by a bowling attack made up of two men on debut, a man playing his second Test, a man playing his fifth and a man playing his 19th. Vital batting heroics came from two of the men on debut too.

We followed all that because it's Test cricket, not one-day or T20, in which you'll find these themes in full flower.

And then gunmen attack Sri Lanka's Test cricketers in Lahore, killing their security policemen and injuring a few players. I follow this sickening news just as closely as I followed those earlier joys of Test cricket.

It's typical, I guess of the sub-continent, that not much has been said about the five policemen who repulsed the attack and saved the lives of the Lankans at the cost of their lives. Not to mention, the bus driver. According to Kumar Sangakkara, [quoted on the BBC website] "But, you know, we had an amazing driver who just kept driving the bus straight through all of that to the ground and that's probably what saved us."

It's worth remembering that in Mumbai and many other places, it's these unheralded non-English speaking people - and not interviewed on NDTV - who prevented the carnage from being much worse. Somehow, we [I mean us elites] just forget them. There's a link between that and feeling angry/embarrassed at "Slumdog Millionaire", I suppose.